DISQUS

startupcfo · 1 year ago

I don't see this move getting them to profitability. Their are too many alternatives that don't require a subscription and offer free or very cheap calling. In fact, I used to be CFO at one of them. This is a tough sector to be in.

Adam Ostrow · 1 year ago

It obviously depends on how many people opt for the subscription, but Jaxtr has 10M+ members to market it to. Assuming just a small % of them subscribe, that's reliable, recurring revenue every month, versus waiting on folks to recharge their accounts. It's like prepaid wireless companies versus the monthly plans offered by the main carriers.

donnacha | WordSkill · 1 year ago

Well, I'm one of those ten millions users. I liked the basic idea - being given a local number for each of my long-distance numbers - enough to buy credits and, at first, it worked quite well but it very quickly became clear that this is not a system you can rely upon. Way too many problems and the final crunch was an apparent lack of UK local numbers.

I've returned to using traditional call-through numbers provided by companies such as 1899.com and 18185.co.uk - each provides just one local number and you enter your long-distance numbers by hand each time. Obviously, it would have been great if Jaxtr's unique-number-for-each-contact system worked, but it didn't.

I stopped using Jaxtr a couple of months ago; if they have actually fixed those problems, perhaps they should find some way to attract back/reassure dormant users before trying to tie new customers into subscriptions. As it was, I simply wrote off the money I'd uploaded to them but I'd be pretty upset if I'd had the same problems with a subscription service.

The concept is great and could have been the key to beating the churn usually associated with VOIP services. If it worked.

JimAtJaxtr · 1 year ago

Thanks for your thoughts Donnacha. If you can shoot me an email at connect@jaxtr.com, I'd be happy to talk with you more about your experiences and see if there's anything that we can troubleshoot together.

Alex Drewniak · 1 year ago

When referring to Jaxtr, the figure of10 million users keeps popping up.

I mean, they might have 10 million plus installs of their Social Networking widget but it's rather misleading saying they have that many actual users of their service. What would be interesting is the number of registered accounts on the Jaxtr web that have made a call within the last 2-3 months.